Ben was joined by Frank Bongiorno and Chris Monnox to discuss the history of Australia’s federal parliament being expanded, in 1949 and 1984. We discuss the motivations for these changes, the positions taken by the parties and why it happened when it did. We also discuss efforts to break the ‘nexus’ which links the size of the House to the size of the Senate.
There has been a great deal of focus this week on the events of the Dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s Labor government, fifty years ago last Tuesday.
I have been particularly drawn to examining how the role of the Senate has changed since 1975, but also throughout the history of the federation. Changes in electoral systems, the size of the Parliament and a fragmenting party system has produced a Senate quite different to the one that blocked supply in 1975.
Today’s post is the latest chapter in my series analysing the history of previous parliamentary expansions at a federal level. In my last post, I analysed how the pendulum changed during the 1948 redistribution. For this post, I am going to look at how MPs responded to this new map, which seats were left without a sitting MP at the subsequent election, and how the swing varied depending on whether an MP ran for the seat.
The first expansion of parliament was passed in 1948, and came into force at the 1949 election. It was also the largest increase we’ve seen, either proportionally or in raw numbers. The House and Senate were each expanded by two thirds – the House grew from 74 to 121, while the Senate grew from 36 to 60.
Yes, it’s very early, but I’ve launched my partial guide to the next Australian federal election, due in 2028.
This guide covers the 102 House seats in New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. These jurisdictions won’t have a redistribution (barring an expansion of parliament). The guide also features guides to the eight Senate contests.
When the new electoral map was published in 1984, it kicked off a game of musical chairs, but with a difference – this time there were more seats than players. Some of these seats were more attractive than others, but it wasn’t simply a matter of every sitting MP moving to the safest possible seat.
If there is a substantial expansion of the size of the federal Parliament, it will be a rare event. It has only happened twice before since federation, and hasn’t happened at all in my lifetime. About two thirds of Australian voters hadn’t cast their first vote before the last expansion in 1984.
As part of my efforts to prepare election guides for all of the upcoming elections, I have now published a guide to the 2027 NSW state election. While that election is still almost a year and a half away, the lack of redistributions in NSW (and Victoria) has allowed me to prepare guides for those elections a long way out.
The Australian Electoral Commission yesterday published the official statistics that will be used for federal redistributions in South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT. This gives us a bit more insight into what is likely to happen in those redistributions.
New Zealand will go to the polls next year at their next general election, and the electoral map of New Zealand has been redrawn in advance of that election.
New Zealand’s parliament is elected via mixed member proportional, with a majority of MPs elected to represent single-member electorates using first-past-the-post, and the remainder elected from party lists as top-ups to ensure overall proportionality.